Mario Petrucci is a multi-award-winning poet, freelance educator, filmmaker and eco-physicist. Shortlisted for the 2012 Ted Hughes Award, Tales from the Bridge was the world’s largest 3D poetry soundscape, a centrepiece of London’s Cultural Olympiad. Petrucci’s many prizes include the Daily Telegraph/ Arvon Prize (for Heavy Water: a poem for Chernobyl) and four outright wins in the London Writers Competition. After its publication, Poetry London placed Heavy Water among the top five collections of the year, noting how it “inflicts… the finest sort of shock, not just to the senses, but to the conscience, to the soul”; meanwhile, Verse [USA] described the book as “Poetry on a geological scale… a new track for poets of witness.”
Frequently commissioned by the BBC and the British Council, Petrucci is the only poet to have been in residence at the Imperial War Museum. He engaged orchestras and their endangered instruments for BBC Radio 3’s Listen Up! festival as the station’s first ever resident poet. His work maintains a strong public presence through such avenues as The Spectator, The Independent, BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service. The driving force behind many civic and educational projects combining science with poetry, Petrucci attracts key commissions regarding creative writing in schools and environmental awareness (e.g. with the Poetry Society). A tireless innovator, he is a Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund.
Audio Recordings:
Nightwalker
Crib